You know what's nice about tea sachets? Not having to measure anything. I knew very little about tea before getting a job with two leaves and a bud, but it's a steep learning curve. (Steep. Ha! But pun not intended.) One of the first items in the office I met was the little blue scale that we use to measure out loose tea.

"Aim for about 2.5 grams per cup of tea," Bess told me on my first day, putting a pinch of tea onto the scale. It turns out, each of our sachets contains about 2.5 grams of tea leaves, herbs, flowers and fruit pieces, depending on which sachet you're brewing. And since these are substantial, full-leaf teas (not cut up into little pieces to fit in a little paper teabag, that is), you can forget about your grandmother's tiny teacup. A sachet from two leaves and a bud is for a mug — anywhere between 8 and 16 ounces of tea, depending on your taste preferences.

Recently two leaves founder Richard Rosenfeld mentioned that over the years of fixing mugs of tea, he's perfected his perfect, 2.5-gram pinch of tea. Perhaps even enough to not have to use the scale at all. You can imagine my reaction: "You're going to have to prove that for the blog, you know."

If perfect is 2.5 grams, this pinch was pretty far from perfect.

So, we gather it all together in his office: little blue scale, a couple of sleeves of loose tea, and Richard's fingers. We spread some tea out on a white piece of paper, and he gathers some up with those perfect pinching fingers. (A note here: Never just dump loose tea straight from the package on to your scale. The point of picking tea up with your fingers from a large pile on a table is because you want a good sampling of all the tea in the bag — whole leaves, broken pieces, buds from the tea plant — for the best flavor.)

Richard places the pinch of tea in the scale and ... uh oh. He's way, way off. Instead of 2.5 grams of tea, he's managed to put an entire 6.1 grams of tea onto the scale at once. Pretty far from perfect.

But, this is the part of the blog where instead of being amused, I have to be honest. He was measuring Genmai Matcha, a unique loose tea we sell from Japan known as "brown rice tea" because it has puffs of roasted brown rice in it. To be fair, it's difficult to get an accurate pinch of this tea when your fingers are thrown off by rice, green tea leaves and powdered green tea (that's the "Matcha") that turned Richard's fingers bright green.

So we turned to the bag of loose Organic Assam tea — the tea that Richard drinks every morning, without fail. We dumped it out on a piece of paper, he pinched, we measured ... 2.4 grams. Don't you hate it when somebody is as good at something as they claim to be?

Richard's perfect pinch of Assam.

But here's the thing about that little blue scale: it's not the one tasting your tea — you are. If you like the taste of 6.1 grams of Genmai Matcha in a 10 ounce mug of hot water, go for it. The beauty of loose tea is the ability of making it just how you like it, little blue scale and perfect pinches be damned.

One last note: Richard is actually fond of putting 6 or 7 grams of Genmai Matcha into a filter and steeping it for only 10 seconds. Since the Matcha dissolves quickly, that method makes for a mug of tea with big green tea flavor, and less taste of the roasted rice. Me, I like steeping 2.5 to 3 grams of Genmai Matcha for several minutes in an average-sized mug of tea, so I can get that roasty, toasty rice flavor. "Different steeps for different creeps," Richard says.

If I asked you if you'd like a cup of tea, what kind would you want? In your head you're going through all the varieties of tea you can think of, trying to make a decision. Maybe Earl Grey, Chamomile, some variety of green tea ...

Silver needles are the young buds of the Camellia sinensis plant, and look like their name.

The world of tea is really, really large. Consider that at two leaves and a bud we have 16 different offerings of tea that come in sachets, but those barely scratch the surface of how many varieties of tea are out there. This is one reason why we recently started offering 15 new teas only in loose form, known as our "exclusively loose" line of teas.

These are wildly different teas — from the polarizing smokiness of the aforementioned Lapsang Souchong, to the light and floral flavor of a Jade Oolong. These teas have great stories — Pinhead Gunpowder is a green tea produced in China with leaves that are withered, steamed, neatly rolled and then dried and polished into small round pellets. Hojicha is known as "stem tea" because it's made only with the stems of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, and not leaves. Genmai Matcha is a Japanese tea made of leaves of green tea, roasted brown rice and powdered green tea. Silver Needles look just like their name, since they're made from the young buds of the Camellia sinensis plant, and have a fine, silvery hair on them.

Pinhead gunpowder: looks like ammunition, tastes like tea.

Sure, loose tea can seem a little intimidating — it's just not as easy as plunking a sachet into a mug and adding water. On the other hand, the process of measuring out a teaspoon per cup, putting it in a filter (or even leaving it floating it loose in your mug), is gratifying, and after a while even becomes ritualistic.

I'd even argue that there's a certain magic to peering into your cup to watch your Jasmine Pearls unfurl slowly as they steep. Richard points out that in China they're fond of putting the tea loose into the cup, and then refilling the cup repeatedly with water as they drink, steeping indefinitely.

Dark Oolong: smoky, dark, tasty.

If you want to take a step into exploring any of these teas, now is a good time — we're offering 20 percent off these exclusively loose teas, while supplies last. You'll find suggestions on how to prepare each variety on our website, and plenty of accessories like filters and teapots. My own suggestion: try the smoky and rich Dark Oolong the next time you're having Chinese food. Delicious.

You learn a lot about tea when you start a job at a tea company. In my first month here at two leaves and a bud, I've tried to pronounce "Tamayokucha," learned that some chai teas really are better than others (but I'm not naming names), and been told more than once to refill the electric kettle.

So then Bess mentions the new loose leaf tea we're going to be carrying — plenty of different kinds, two of which are Genmai Matcha and Hoji Cha. Great, I think. Another couple of teas I can't pronounce. But catching a glimpse of these varieties in little sample bags around the office, it's clear there's something really different about these two.

A pile of Genmai Matcha tea.

Genmai Matcha, Japanese for "brown rice tea," is exactly that: green tea combined with roasted brown rice. So, you've got your tea leaves, and then floating around with them are grains of rice (some of them, by the way, look like popcorn, because a few of the grains pop during the roasting process). "What's this, a science experiment?" my husband said, half joking, while leaning over the cup of Genmai Matcha I had sitting next to the computer last night. "You'll be amazed," I told him. "It's like drinking a cup of green tea paired with those Asian rice crackers we sometimes snack on." He sipped, he gave an approving grunt, he nodded. He's sold.

When you're looking at this loose tea, you'll also notice a green powder in with the leaves and roasted rice — that's the matcha, a powdered green tea that gives it color and a nice green tea flavor.

Hoji Cha tea looks like little sticks.

As a tea neophyte, I want to tell you how Hoji Cha tea looks like tiny sticks. (When you're new at describing tea, you use any modifier you can think of. Although I wouldn't recommend referring to a cup of tea as "tasting like dirt." You might want to go with "earthy." Just a tip.) But it turns out, I'm right about the stick thing. Hoji Cha is tea made only from stems and stalks of the Camellia Sinensis plant — the very tea plant where we get our two leaves and a bud from. So what's with this "stem tea," as some Japanese call it? The one we'll be offering as loose leaf tea brews up a pretty amber-brown color, and has a rich and nutty, slightly sweet flavor.